Halfway into the IDABC programme, the European Commission is organising the IDABC mid-term Conference, on 12-13 February in Brdo, Slovenia together with the Slovenian Presidency of the European Union.
The purpose of the event is to demonstrate the achievements of the IDABC programme so far and to introduce a vision for a possible future follow-on programme.
If you are interested in attending the mid-term IDABC conference, but you are not a member of the IDABC expert group, please fill in a call for expression of interest.
Talking with my friend and open source advocate Flavia Marzano we decided to write an open letter to the Italian Minister for Technology Innovation Luigi Nicolais, and we asked associations, CIOs in the public sectors and professors to sign the letter.
Punto Informatico, one of the most important Italian IT online magazine, today reported the letter, and I am looking forward to know all the (open source) truth!
Below the original text (Italian). Fellow bloggers, spread the word as you did before!
Is Bill Hilf right saying that with proprietary software you buy a guarantee, and you can eventually sue someone if something goes wrong? CIOs working within small to medium enterprises are probably more interested in software that works than in buying this “ecosystem of accountability”. Need to know more about what open source can do for you? Read the Open Source Guide for SMEs.
The problem is you’ve given the user something of great value for free (i.e. the product), and now you’re asking him to pay for something of much less value (i.e. the support). [..]
OSS businesses of the future will have to offer products to paying customers that are different than what is available for free. Emphasis on products.
VCs do like millions of downloads, but we all know that one customer every thousand users might be a viable strategy for MySql and very few others. Despite it is questionable if support has or not less value than the product itself, we know it is true that selling the right to use assets is more profitable than selling ownership of assets. In this respect Savio, emphasizing the importance of the product, is definitely raising an interesting issue. Soon more on these subjects.
I wish you all a great year, and invite you to take a moment to watch this Blue Man Group video: our planet is the only one we can live on, take good care of it, either if you love or hate open source.
Roberto has over 20 years experience in the computer industry, and has spent the last 10 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he also served on some advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. He works at SourceForge, and opinions expressed here don't necessarily represent employer's positions, strategies, or opinion.
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